Park for Montreal's 6,000 Irish Famine victims could become a reality

André Burroughs, an environmental adviser with Hydro-Québec, said archeological excavations yielded several artifacts from the mid-1800s, including the bottle shown, on a site near the burial place of 6,000 Irish Famine migrants who died in 1847-48 near Bridge St. Pierre Obendrauf / Montreal Gazette

Montreal could soon have a commemorative site honouring 6,000 Irish Famine refugees who died on the city’s waterfront in 1847-48, organizers say.

Two years ago, members of the Montreal Irish Monument Park Foundation were devastated to learn the land they had hoped to acquire for a memorial park was slated for an electrical substation to supply the future Réseau express métropolitain (REM) train.

But two years of talks between Hydro-Québec, the city of Montreal, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, which owns the REM, and the Irish community have borne fruit, said Victor Boyle, a director of the foundation.

“Fergus and I walk around bouncing like five-year-olds,” Boyle said in an interview alongside fellow director Fergus Keyes.

On Thursday, they will present a preliminary proposal by an 18-member working committee — including urban planners, architects, archeologist, Hydro-Québec, the city and members of the Irish community — in a public meeting at St. Gabriel’s Church.

Hydro-Québec has agreed to cede 1.5 hectares of its site for the proposed park, to be located on Bridge St., near the Black Rock monument.

Dredged from the river in 1859 by workers building the Victoria Bridge, the rough boulder is the world’s oldest memorial to victims of the Irish Famine, in which an estimated one million people died from 1845 to 1849.

It now sits in a grass median between traffic lanes on Bridge St., where passing motorists barely notice it.

The working committee’s preferred proposal is to move part of Bridge St. between des Irlandais and the Canada Post building at 225 Bridge St. slightly to the north and locate the almond-shaped park between it and the future REM line, to run parallel to the current CN tracks.

The Black Rock would stay where it is and become the centrepiece of the proposed park.

The proposal calls for a pool to evoke the immigrants’ ocean crossing, a paved walkway, outdoor agora, panels explaining the significance of the site and a vegetable garden to evoke the potato crop that failed, causing the famine.

Keyes said the visitor panels would focus not just on the suffering of the Irish, but also on Montrealers’ humanitarian efforts to care for them.

Nuns, priests, doctors and the city’s mayor, John Easton Mills, lost their lives caring for the sick. The Mohawks of Kahnawake contributed food for the starving.

“This is a Montreal story with an Irish flavour,” Keyes said.

Like the St. Patrick’s Parade, “it’s got to be all-encompassing,” he said.

Boyle said the working committee studied 25 memorials around the world to come up with ideas.

Hydro-Québec has supported the project wholeheartedly, he said.

“They’re taking on this project with so much enthusiasm,” he said.

City councillor Craig Sauvé of the Sud-Ouest borough said the progress made by the committee shows what can be achieved when different groups work together.

“It’s a part of Montreal where history is ultra-important. It’s a sacred place for many people,” he said.

The preliminary proposal will be presented to the City of Montreal on Jan. 30 and then the city will study the possibility of moving Bridge St. to make way for the park, Sauvé said.

Since the proposals are not finalized, no cost estimates have been done yet — an issue that will be addressed after environmental studies are completed in March, Boyle said. He said the park could open as early as 2023.

One element that had to be dropped from the proposal because of the smaller site was a playing field for Gaelic football, he said.

André Burroughs, an environmental adviser with Hydro-Québec, said archeological excavations commissioned in late 2017 yielded several artifacts from the mid-1800s on the site on the north side of Bridge St. near des Irlandais.

However, no graves were uncovered, he said.

That is consistent with maps from the 1800s, he said, which show that the site of the future substation is where hospital sheds were erected in 1847 to care for victims of the typhus epidemic brought by coffin ships from Ireland.

The site where the typhus victims were buried lies mostly south of Bridge St. and includes the Black Rock, he said.

“We are pretty sure that our installations will not touch the cemetery,” he said.

The objects found in the dig included crockery, clay pipes and a glass mineral-water bottle. The artifacts could date from the period of the typhus epidemic, or from the construction of the Victoria Bridge in the 1850s, when workers were housed in the former hospital sheds, Burroughs said.

The area later became the working class Goose Village neighbourhood, which was demolished in 1964, and was later the site of the Autostade, where the Montreal Alouettes played in the late 1960s and 1970s.

In the mid-19th century, the site was on the waterfront, but because of landfill, the river is now 500 metres away, Burroughs noted.

“It’s about survival and triumph,” Boyle said of the lessons of 1847. After a decade of working on the project, he’s hoping the same will be true of the memorial site.

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